


Heredity

by Sanj



Category: Time Quintet - L'Engle
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-01
Updated: 2006-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:42:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanj/pseuds/Sanj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So you're saying you and Charles Wallace got more out of my Ma in one night than the rest of us did in thirty years."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heredity

Calvin left the conference room grinning ear to ear, and hoping that there might, somewhere, be coffee. Today was a great day -- El Zarco's peace accords had topped the Times left outside his hotel door.

And his morning session on maritime ecology had gone well. Very well. He caressed the cards in his pocket again, contact information for senior scholars treated like notes from a lover.

"Dr. O'Keefe?" The woman who caught his arm was so short and small that she looked liked his baby sister, but she had a badge identifying her as "Sarah Hawkins, Conference Staff." The accent was careful BBC, with a hint of something else that Calvin couldn't identify.

"It's not quite 'doctor' yet," he said, grinning to try and charm her. She looked so serious. Was she ever called Sadie, he wondered, poor thing? She just stared up at him, so sober-faced that Calvin started to backpedal. "I mean, it'll be soon enough, there's just the dissertation and that's going well, really well..."

"But you're Calvin O'Keefe, from Princeton University?"

"Yes," he said, and now he knew that the frown on her face was not about him, but for him. Something wrong at home. Please, not Meg, he thought, his wife's name involuntarily escaping his lips. Or the baby, he added, thinking of the unborn child in her womb.

"Mrs. O'Keefe left a message for you to ring home as soon as you were available."

Of the available Mrs. O'Keefes in his mind, Meg was slightly more likely than Ma to make a transatlantic call at -- god, it had to be 5 AM over there -- but not much more likely.

"My wife? You spoke with her?"

"Mrs. Meg O'Keefe," she said, looking down at the scrap of paper in her hand. "She said not to worry about the time in the States, but to ring as soon as I found you. I knew your session was just getting out, so I came right over here."

Calvin felt a weird lump forming in his throat. Something was very, very wrong, and on the Murry scale of Things Going Wrong, Calvin couldn't even imagine. His legs were already running for the pay phone, his mouth was already telling the operator that it would be a collect transatlantic call, before he waved "thank you" over at the disappearing Sarah Hawkins, Conference Staff.

Charles Wallace picked up the phone, and he could hear his brother-in-law (how strange, still, that new connection!) tell the operator that yes, of course they'd accept the charges, and then Charles Wallace said, "Meg, it's Calvin," in a tired-sounding voice -- without even talking to him. As though it was Meg's job to tell him whatever needed telling.

"Calvin," she said, and he was as relieved to hear her voice as she sounded.

"What happened?"

"Oh, so much... Calvin, you should come home. Beezie -- god, your mother -- she's dead. She died about an hour ago."

He couldn't have heard that right. "Ma? Wasn't she at Thanksgiving with you?" And hadn't that fact been odd enough?

"Her heart wasn't good, Dennys says. Oh, Calvin. I'm so sorry."

"What happened?" Calvin asked again. He couldn't wrap his head around -- there was something Meg was trying to get him to understand....

"Please just come home. There's so much to explain, and there's been, well, another thing."

"A thing? A Mrs. Which sort of thing?"

"Exactly -- and your mother -- oh, God, Calvin, I never knew her at all --"

"She got caught up in it?" How? You know her heart's not good, push her through a 2-dimensional space or into a mitochondrion and it could kill her --

Had killed her. Had killed. Her.

"Ma," he said softly. "Ma?"

"Sandy already called, you're on the noon flight from Heathrow. Or, God, do you need to stay there? How did it go?" That was Meg belatedly remembering that he'd just presented at the most important conference in his career.

"It went really well, and I -- I'll tell you later. I'll see you at the airport. Thank Sandy for me."

"I love you," her voice was saying as he hung up the phone.

 

O'KEEFE, BRANWEN ZILLAH (nee MADDOX) - Friday morning, at the home of her third son's family, of cardiac arrest. Mrs. O'Keefe, 44, was born and raised in the area, attended local schools, and married shortly following the death of her brother. The couple had eleven children and were married for twenty-six years.

Mrs. O'Keefe was a fixture in the local community, and committed herself to a large and loving family for whose welfare she was responsible during the illness and subsequent loss of her husband. A mass in Mr. and Mrs. O'Keefe's honor will be held at Our Lady of Victory next Sunday. Contributions may be sent to the chucrh benevolent fund.

She is predeceased by her husband, Padraig; her brother, Charles; and loving members of the Maddox family, as well as her son Sean and her daughter, Janet. She is survived by sons Patrick, Michael, Calvin, William, Kevin, and John, and her daughters Bridget, Mary Elizabeth, and Cathleen, and their spouses and families. Calling hours will take place on Monday at 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. at the Kinney Funeral Home. A Mass of Christian Burial will be held on Tuesday in the Our Lady of Victory chapel. Burial is tentatively set for April.

"Allow me to translate," said Hinky, already well into his second six-pack. Calvin guessed he and Meg had better leave soon. If it had gotten to the translation of the obituary -- a fine O'Keefe tradition -- they'd probably start getting rowdier than Meg would want to handle. They usually drank until the bar closed after they left the funeral home.

"Dear old Ma, who was married at the ripe old age of sixteen in a shotgun wedding to that ham-handed bastard, our dear old Pop." Hinky took a drink to Pop, then, and they all solemnly followed suit -- even Meg, beside him, sipped her ginger ale, narrowing her eyes a little.

"Dear old Ma, then, was the long-suffering wife of a dedicated alcoholic who couldn't seem to figure out the link between having sex and having babies. So Ma kept popping out the little O'Keefes, and took handouts from the church poor fund, and hated the church ladies who hated her. And sometimes Ma hit her kids when we didn't understand that the poor old bitch was stretching out bean soup for eleven starving brats. She hid Pop's being dead drunk from his boss until his liver gave out, and somehow held her shit together after Sean wrecked the car, at least until Jannie, God love her, fell in with that motherfucker sonofabitch whose name I will not utter at my own Ma's wake, but rest assured that if he ever comes into this fucking little town again, I will personally remove his sonofabitch stoner head from his sonofabitch stoner body.

"She is survived by the rest of us losers, and sweet little Cathy, and Doctor Cal over there, who went off and married the crazy geniuses next door and is even now making little crazy genius babies to carry on the O'Keefe name, which means the rest of us had better get on it, lads. Anyway, God rest Ma's crazy old soul."

"Amen," chorused Calvin with the rest of his brothers and sisters and cousins -- because actually, Hinky had done a pretty good job. And then he noticed that Meg was starting to get that cross-eyed look that meant she was about to start a fight or, these days, possibly vomit, and he hurried to fetch her coat and tell Lizzy and Gidget and his brothers' girls good night, and pound Junior and Kevin and Hinky and Johnny on the back, and press twenty bucks into Mike's hand for the tab. It was more than they'd drank, but not so much so that Mike would stir up a fuss about it.

She was quiet all the way out to the car, murmured "thank you" as he held open the door for her, and then was silent until they turned down Wisteria. Just as he was about to ask exactly what facet of the evening was troubling her, she anticipated him -- of course.

"What's going to happen to Johnny and Cathy?"

It wasn't the question he'd expected. "Cathy's going to stay with my Aunt Beverly -- she works at a girls' school in Massachusetts. She's a bit dotty, but all right, and Cathy can go to her school for free. Kevin's still got another year of school, so he and Johnny are staying with Mike and Donna."

"I liked her," Meg said, almost absently, and it took Calvin a minute to realize she was talking about his sister-in-law. He made a neutral noise of agreement; Donna was all right, he supposed, certainly better than that tramp Junior was seeing, and the boys couldn't get much more screwed up than they were already.

And then the storm, finally, crept in. "Why did Hinky say those things? Why was everyone laughing at her?"

Oh. Because of course the familiar customs were, to Meg, completely unfamiliar. And probably mean, in the Murry world. "It's an O'Keefe thing," he said vaguely. "I mean, read the obituary. They're written from a form. Nobody at the newspaper knew her unless they knew her as that old woman in the church, or that poor lamentable bitch down the street. Same for anybody else in our family. So we try and translate the obit to say what it means instead of what it says. I guess it's speaking ill of the dead, kind of, but we've always done it."

"I get it," she said. "It's better than saying lies. I just -- Calvin, Hinky was wrong. She wasn't like that. I don't think anybody really knew her."

"So you're saying you and Charles Wallace got more out of my Ma in one night than the rest of us did in thirty years."

"Don't put it like that."

"Well, don't romanticize her. She did what she could, and she tried, and I loved her, but she was a crazy old bitch and there's no point in lying about it."

"Calvin! She was your mother!"

Calvin pulled the car smoothly into their parking spot. "That's what I said. She was my mother, and I knew her every day of my life, so don't act like you Murrys have the red phone to God all the time."

Meg stared at him. He wasn't sure what had gotten into him, either, but that didn't stop him from slamming the car door and walking away -- away from the house, away from her. He pretended not to hear her calling after him. He could always run if he had to, and they both knew she wouldn't.

 

"He's been at the Murrys again," Jannie tattled as Calvin came in late from what was supposed to have been basketball practice.

"Here's to you and Mrs. Robinson," Mike whistled, and Ma whacked him on the head with her spoon. "What?" Mike was aggrieved. "Everybody knows he's just hanging around Mrs. Murry like a tail-waggin' dog ever since her husband dumped her."

"Yeah, except everybody knows that Dr. Murry came home night before last," Calvin said. "At least, 'everybody' as in the people who can actually read the morning paper."

"Oh, that's right, 'cause you're an intellectual." Hinky came in and kicked at Calvin's bag in the doorway. "Ow! Ow! I bruised my toe on all the books!"

"Shut up, Hinky. Cal, where was he? Did he really leave her for an affair? Did he come back home on the train?" Jannie at eleven was a romantic, and listened to the country music station on the radio.

"He was working on a top-secret project for the government," Calvin told her, and she looked impressed. Nobody else did.

"Bet the secret project was his secretary," said Gidget, ducking Ma, who was apparently in a hitting mood.

"He came home because he came home," said Ma. "And Calvin's over there because the food's better, I guess. If you can eat with Dr. and Mrs. Doctor Fancy-Pants Murry, Calvin, I guess you can give your pancakes to Jan."

"I didn't eat," Calvin said. He and Dr. Murry had played chess, and then he and Meg had walked out for a while around the star-watching rock, and talked, and that was all.

"More's the pity," Ma said. "I ain't feeding you here." And she didn't, not for a whole year. Calvin had dinner with the Murrys or didn't eat at all, until he started bringing her his paycheck from that drugstore job.

 

It was the last week of November, and snow had fallen every day since Calvin had flown in from London. Snow on snow on snow, he thought, knowing that Meg would have said it, and now he was starting to feel sort of cold and miserable and stupid.

"Figured you'd end up here," said Charles Wallace, and there he was at the star-watching rock, two miles from where he'd started. "Meg said you took a walk."

"Can you really hear her all the way across town?"

"When she uses the telephone? Yes." Charles Wallace actually grinned at that, and Calvin sort of laughed and patted the large yellow dog they'd acquired. Ananda. Sort of Labradorish, sort of something else.

Of course, with the Murrys, something else could be singular cherubim.

"I don't know why I came here. I'm feeling very un-Murryish right this minute."

"Your head is. Your feet aren't."

"Never took you for a dualist."

"I wasn't until I was riding around in other peoples' brains. Couldn't run my own body. Not even when your mom's stepdad pushed Chuck down the stairs. I couldn't talk, and his mind was still broken."

"Was that -- her stepfather-- was he really chasing after my Mom?"

Charles Wallace nodded. "With Chuck in a home and her grandmother dead, Beezie didn't have anybody who'd believe her. So she married your dad. I don't know if she was pregnant or not when she married him, but I do know that wasn't why she married him."

"Why didn't she just go? Run away, get on a train?"

"What girl did that thirty years ago? And a pretty girl like your mom? And she was only fifteen, sixteen? I had no idea she was so young."

"Same age as your mom. Just malnutrition and neglect and eleven kids. And the women on my mom's side always had heart trouble. Her mom died young, too."

"I'm really sorry."

"I'm really angry," Calvin said, and he knew Charles Wallace already knew that, too, so he just let him have it. "I mean, what did you guys do to her? You knew her heart wasn't good."

Charles Wallace crouched at Calvin's feet in the snow, sitting on his boots. "You ever try to talk your Ma out of anything?"

Calvin thought about that. Really thought. "When Meg and I got engaged, yeah. She said she wouldn't come to the wedding."

"What changed her mind?"

"Jannie's suicide, I think. It had nothing to do with me or Meg. Just Jannie taking all those pills. And Pa dying the year before. And Sean's stupid accident. I guess Ma decided she'd better hang on to the family she had left, or at least not alienate the one kid least likely to get himself killed." He picked up a snowball and threw it, watched it plummet into the oak tree. "If only she knew, you know? What we've got up to sometimes around here."

"Well, she did know, at the end."

"And it killed her."

"And she gave us the rune, and she saved the world doing it. She knew what she was doing, Calvin. I swear."

"I still can't believe that. Mad Dog Branzillo, or whatever you said."

Charles Wallace stood up, then. "Look at me."

He was almost full-grown, Calvin noticed. "What about you?"

"I ought to be dead, is what. Ten years ago, of severe acute mitochondritis. Remember?"

That he had danced with a farandola inside of one of Charles Wallace's mitochondria? "Of course I remember."

"Can you actually look me in the eye and tell me you don't believe me and Meg about Beezie and Branzillo? Or understand what she sacrificed? That she gave us everything she had, and willingly?"

Calvin felt the sting of tears in his eyes, but he never cried in front of people. "I believe it," he said. "I just wish I had been there."

Charles Wallace took his hand. "Let me show you."

And Calvin let his brother-in-law, that weird little kid he loved better than all his blood brothers put together -- Calvin let Charles Wallace work whatever strange power he had, and then Calvin was inside Charles Wallace's memory, starring a younger version of Ma -- Beezie Maddox as she was -- and then Calvin O'Keefe was crying for real.

He looked up to apologize, but Charles Wallace didn't say anything about it, just, "you probably want to get back home. Should Dennys drive you? It's cold out. Or."

"Well?"

"I forget sometimes you're really married," he said. "You don't want me to walk home with you to Meg so you can make up with her, because she doesn't live here anymore, and, well, you're married." Charles Wallace looked so embarrassed that Calvin just hugged him, laughing a little unsteadily in a most Murryish fashion.

"She makes better hot chocolate than your mom. We have a real stove and everything."

"It's only got two burners," Charles Wallace corrected him.

Calvin shrugged. "You've got to start somewhere."

 

Meg looked relieved when Calvin showed up with Charles Wallace in tow, but her concern was apparently all for her brother. "Mom said you'd disappeared, but I told her you were all right," she told her brother, pulling him inside. "As for you..." she glared up at him, demanding a password.

"I'm a creep and I don't deserve you?"

Meg frowned. "No, that's not it. Try again."

Calvin tried flattery. "You are a goddess among women."

She was still dissatisfied. "All I get from you is hyperbole."

"I taught you what hyperbole is, woman."

"And yet you still can't plot a real one on a graph without me."

"I'm nothing without you. I'm sorry. All right?"

"No, but come in, you're freezing." She hugged him tight, nevertheless, and Calvin grazed his hands over her stomach. "Charles Wallace, I'll get the chocolate," she said, before Charles Wallace even had time to shuck off his wet boots. "Call Mom and tell her you're here and staying on the couch tonight."

"Am I?" he asked.

"Can you drive yet?" Calvin asked him rhetorically.

"Not in the legal sense, no."

Meg shoved him toward their little living room. "Then you're staying on the couch."

Charles Wallace dutifully went and called, his warm tenor muttering back indistinctly through the partition.

"I'm really sorry," Meg and Calvin said at the same time. "I didn't know her," added Meg. "You're right."

"Charles Wallace showed me what happened. I've kythed before, but -- it was just like I could read his mind. Is it always like that with you two?"

"Only sometimes," she said. "Sometimes he's as much of a brick wall as anybody."

"I'm jealous," he said. "I got the Ma who used to hit us with a birch switch and scream at us, and who made me wear third-hand everything, and didn't want to come to the wedding, and you got -- Beezie. And now I know--"

"What?"

"Ten years I've been telling myself I didn't belong. That I was a biological sport." He looked up at her. "You know, I almost suggested I change my name to Murry, rather than the other way around?"

"I do know that," she said. "I used to wonder if you were marrying me or my family."

"Well, there were days early on when I wasn't sure myself. I wanted -- what Beezie wanted, I guess. To be away, to have a different chance, to be somebody else. It was a while before I fell in love with you for just you."

"Really?"

"Probably took, oh, an hour and a half," he said, and slipped a kiss onto her cheek. "Somewhere in the middle of the trigonometry."

Meg leaned against him, really forgiving him this time. "You were in the right place at the right time," she said.

Calvin nodded, and tucked her in under his chin. "I get it from my mom," he said, savoring the new words on his tongue.

**Author's Note:**

> "Heredity" was written for krabapple, in the Yuletide 2005 challenge. This one was betaed by the dream team: BanSidhe, Kass, Ellen Fremedon, and Cereta. I cannot possibly convey how much fun it was to write in Madeleine L'Engle's universe, nor how surprising it was to find this particular story in my head.


End file.
